Game board rock carvings in Hong Kong and Macao: reexamining their significance and dating

Abstract

The present study is divided in two parts: first, it offers a description of the game boards unearthed in Hong Kong and Macao, outlining the significance of the different theories proposed to explain the origin of these rock carvings in the light of the most recent scholarship on their Western counterparts, with which they had been previously compared. Second, it documents newly discovered game board rock carvings in Hong Kong and, through a comparative analysis of the evidence associated to similar carvings in Macao and Europe (archaeological contextualization, common typology and organization, and functionality), offers a tentative dating of eighteenth-nineteenth century. On account of the coincidence in their arrangement and design and the fact that there is no evidence of similar alquerque-like game board clusters outside of Europe in early times –all known examples appearing within a Roman or Christian context or being the result of territorial expansion or trade–, it shall be concluded that these game boards are the result of late contacts between European merchants stationed in Macao and Hong Kong and local tradesmen who may have assimilated and adapted these games to their own local culture, spreading them across the trading routes that connected old villages.